It Will Happen Again

I should be finishing up my end of year 2011 in review blog.  But I have been literally nauseous for the past 24 hours and I am thinking I will have better luck writing that blog if I get this one out first.

HSF hits the road in t-minus 144 hours.  I am going to calculate it into hours because it makes it seem longer that way.  I understand that the love of my life isn't going to war.  In fact, I am not even technically saying goodbye to a boyfriend.  I am just watching someone I care about deeply do what is very normal for 20 year olds to do, and that is go to school and get a degree like an adult.  So why does this seem so much harder to walk away from then that moment after high school graduation where the friends I had spent a decade with were all going their own ways too?

I guess the big difference is that he is leaving and I am staying. As much as I am sad to see him go, I can't deny the fact that I am a little envious.  I've always been a little envious of this kid.  He doesn't have to pay rent, utilities, or for groceries.  He doesn't have to set an alarm to wake up in the morning for work.  The only thing I seem to have on this kid is the lack of a curfew. 

So how come after all the hard work I do, and all I struggle with just to keep a roof over my head and my water kept on, how come HE gets to go start over?  How come he gets a free pass to try again, wipe the slate clean, and follow his dreams?  I feel like at 24 I am already stuck in the cycle of adulthood and watching him jump through it like a circus performer, coming out the other side unscathed, really kind of pisses me off.

But jealousy aside, he has become a permanent fixture on my couch over the past 5 months, and I don't know if anyone will be able to fill my time and hold my attention as well as he has.  I like to consider HSF the best rebound relationship I've ever had.  He was the perfect band-aide over the broken heart that Charlie had left behind.  He's been charming, and funny; I've at no point in the past 5 months been bored with any conversation we have had.  I was at at beautiful wedding at the Peninsula hotel in Chicago, and my date was upset with me because I ignored a 5 course meal and fantastic wedding band to spend the night texting my 20 year old Napervillian man-friend.

I wrote an essay to Barack Obama about why if I could have dinner with him tomorrow, I would bring HSF as my dinner date.  Some serious shit has gone down in 5 months.

So it's ending.  And he will get in a U-Haul in 6 days and take his life, the very little of it he has had yet, and move away.  And I will have to process him leaving the same way I have with every man before him.  The hardest part is realizing that this doesn't have to end in the most negative way possible. I don't need to be heartbroken and abandoned, because he isn't leaving me, he is just leaving.  And I truly believe that if he was to still be here in 6 months, we would still be us.  The only thing that changes about our relationship now is that it is over, not that one person broke the other person's heart.

There is an awesome early 2000s film called 'Someone Like You' starring Ashley Judd and Hugh Jackman.  In it the lead female realizes a pattern in the men around her, that more often than not they leave her.  I guess the advice her love interest leaves with her is all I could ask for right about now :

Jane: Because if this theory is wrong, men don't leave all women, Eddie. They leave me.
Eddie: I know it hurts. I know. It's so hard to believe that something that wonderful can ever happen to us again, but it can.